Maybe it was a misunderstanding and they were actually mining Monero or Ethereum, because journalists often mistake them for Bitcoin when it comes to mining - for example, during the recent browser mining plague they were often claiming that visitors have to mine Bitcoin. And if this rig is more than just bundling together a bunch of old smartphones, if they made some changes to hardware to essentially turn them into ASICs, than it might be really profitable.

I think this decision is mostly political as many other governments also refused to recognize Bitcoin as a currency and gave it a status of commodity instead - most notably the US. By denying Bitcoin the status of a currency they try to prevent it's adoption as such, so people would think about it more as a speculative asset. But most countries don't have any strong position, and since everything that is not banned is allowed, Bitcoin can be used as a currency around the world with no repercussions.

Lets not forget that trading is a zero sum game and traders who get profits are doing so at expense of traders who suffering loses. There's a general opinion that trading involves analytical skills, that it can be learned but most people are silent about less conventional means of getting profits from trading - insider information, all sorts of manipulation like pump and dump, spoofing, spreading false rumors and so on. It's quite possible that such traders are present on Bitcoin markets because they aren't very regulated, and there two ways to solve this problem - either invite regulators all over the world or wait for Bitcoin market to naturally mature. I hope that we will have the second way and in the future the price will be more stable and less manipulated.

Diversifying is a good idea, but as for the second part of your post, holding altcoins, it can be tricky. There's a strong general trend that when Bitcoin is growing, all altcoins lose their BTC value so their USD value remains roughly the same. If you'll put it together with a pretty popular opinion that altcoins are in bubble and that Bitcoin is the best cryptocurrency, than turning a big portion of your portfolio into altcoins might start sounding like a dangerous idea. On the other hand, this year altcoins showed giant growth and people who have been holding them for at least 6 months at that point have managed to get some very big returns (for example, Ethereum was trading at $10 last year, while today it's $300), but it's very hard to tell if this will ever repeat or if altcoins will crash instead. So, if you want to diversify, better pick your coins very carefully and select only 1-3 coins that you think are the best.

The longer Bitcoin's price will be sustained on current level or at least not drop below $4,000-3,000 - the less weight "it grows too fast so it's a bubble" argument will have. For Bitcoin, stability and not crashing are as bullish as getting some 10-20% gains in a day. Maybe it's true that trditional finance already feels the FOMO, maybe most of them listen too much to people like Jamie Dimon, but eventually Bitcoin will be widely recognized and no longer be some risky new tech that is hard to understand.

That's a good sign that blockchain is going mainstream, but it's also sad that blockchain has been separated from cryptocurrencies and many cryptocurrency haters have been embracing it lately. So, on one hand it can be viewed as inadvertent support for cryptocurrencies, but on the other we might see a big competition between private and decentralized blockchains - the private ones will be backed by banks, big companies and governments while decentralized blockchains will be supported by communities and investors. Unless, of course, it will turn out that centralized blockchains are just hype and they can't improve every database system.

Just like with other assets, you simply can't buy all Bitcoins because only a fraction of existing Bitcoins are for sale. People are often being misguided by marketcaps, thinking that they are equal to the total worth of all coins, but reality is a bit more complex. What you really can do is buy all Bitcoins that are on order books on exchanges - that's some dozens-hundreds of thousands coins. As you will be buying, the price will be quickly increasing, so instead of current $5,700 * X, the price will be much higher. After that people will put more Bitcoins for sale at a new high price, so it would be impossible to buy all Bitcoins because the price will be only increasing. And if government will try to print more money to buy more coins, they would just kill the fiat currency and their own economy. This scenario is so unrealistic that there's no chance we'd ever see it happening.

Golden words, I've seen some people here arguing that SegWit2x is an improvement proposal and that Core doesn't have monopoly on Bitcoin's developement, but that's not the point, Bitcoin is whatever chain users support - not miners, and not big businesses - they are supposed to serve the users, not dictate them what to do. And there are no signs that majority of Bitcoin users wants to fork - Core client dominates the node count, Bitcoin communities all over the world reject it, the biggest subreddit /r/Bitcoin rejects it, and most users who have their opinion about forks on this forum also reject it.

Bitcoin will never and shouldn't be integrated as in-game currency in any popular game, because in game currencies are supposed to be infinitely emitted so players can earn them via in-game tasks, and it's also supposed to be destroyed when players spend it to prevent inflation. So, in gaming and VR Bitcoin can only be used as as a payment method, although it may change if the game has some new economic model that is different from all existing mmo's. But there also a problem with scaling - Bitcoin transactions take a few hours to confirm and sometimes have pretty high fees - this means they are pretty bad for microtransactions.

Mainstream journalists tend to overdramatize their reports on Bitcoin, perhaps out of their habit of making sensations out of nothing. It was exactly the same on August 1st - they were reporting that "Bitcoin split in two", that some $6 billion network was created in a single day and that Bitcoin community was suffering from a civil war. For outsiders or Bitcoin newbies it all sounds like Bitcoin is in a serious trouble, while in reality it's just a group of miners and businesses throwing tantrum again and trying to force community to follow their chain as the real Bitcoin - but since they don't have support from users, that's not going to happen. So, it's unlikely that there will be any big disruption that might cause Bitcoin's price to drop.

People often ask here questions like "what if Bitcoin was regulated?" or "can Bitcoin be regulated?". But the answer is, it is already regulated in some countries and this is an example of how it looks - people are forced to participate only on licensed markets like Coinbase, otherwise they will face charges. On the network level we will always be free to do whatever we want with out coins, but governments will always be able to direct the use of cryptocurrencies via their laws. We are still on a very early stages of crypto revolution and many things has to happen before the crypto economy will be able to challenge the governments, but Bitcoin has set the first stone for it.

Most Bitcoin naysayers have one thing in common - their age. Usually they are old people from stock markets, banks and governments who don't understand new technology and are afraid to see their own wealth getting disrupted by a new asset. Their opinions don't have much weight despite their success with fiat economy - because Bitcoin introduces a new type of economy, the one not yet fully studied by economists, so many traditional economic theories simply do not apply to Bitcoin.

If Satoshi would reappear, I think he will most likely refuse to take the role of leader, because he wanted Bitcoin to be developed by open source contributors, with approval from the community, which is what we actually have now. It might even be one of the reasons why he choose to leave, so Bitcoin won't have a weak central point, like for example Vitalik Buterin is for Ethereum's network - just remember how the price crashed some time ago when someone started spreading rumors that he died in a car accident. So, from a technical standpoint it doesn't matter who is Satoshi, and if the market is rational, it shouldn't strongly affect the price.

Anyone can create a fork or make a proposal for Bitcoin Core client, even you and me. Decentralization means that people have to agree with each other to reach consensus and be on the same network - so hard fork is essentially creating a new network and inviting people from original network to switch to a new one. But until people from original network accepted this invitations, those forks have no effect on them, so even if development is controlled by a single person or organization, people can always choose a new developer via a fork.
Now, to be more specific, the upcoming SegWit2x fork is backed by big businesses. it has zero support from current Bitcoin developers and very small support from Bitcoin users - this means that it's unlikely that it will become Bitcoin, it will just be an altcoin.

1. BCH and SegWit2x have strange relations, since BCH was created by Bitmain which also support SegWit2x. This shows that there's no unity or strong political beliefs in SegWit2x camp - they are simply guided by greed.

2. They did it on purpose to be as contentious and disruptive as possible, it's all about trying to force Core to submit to their demands instead of having their own vision. It's not a secret that eventually Core will start preparing for their own block size increase, but only when they will feel like the network is ready - they don't want to risk security for some short term gain in capacity. So, SegWit2x people want to actually control Core or replace it, simply increasing blocksize is not their main goal.

3. There would be a huge legal shitstorm if a company like Coinbase tried to name SegWit2x coin as "BTC". They are not completely suicidal.

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies will get some boost, because investors will be looking for new markets, but it's hard to say how big this effect will be. Maybe it will add 10% to Bitcoin's value, or 50%, but I doubt that it would be able to double it. Also, during that time there can be some other events that might overshadow the effect of stock market crash - it might be negative, like Bitcoin getting banned in some major country, or positive - if it's adoption will be growing and development will progress further. It's also possible that Bitcoin won't be affected at all - many people tried to tie Bitcoin's growth to political and economic climate in the world, suggesting that negative events are boosting Bitcoin's price, but usually there's actually no correlation. But we haven't seen a major economic crisis during the time of Bitcoin's existence, so there are many possibilities.

ICO's will fail not because ERC20 is bad, the problem is not the tokens themselves but the networks that they represent. Most of them are not able to deliver their promises for many reasons, like lack of skill, unrealistic goals or just being plain scams - and the situation is quite similar with real world startups. So, this suggested token 2.0 system might not necessarily solve the problems with current ICO's. What is really needed is community effort for filtering obviously bad projects on early stage, so investors will have to spend less time looking for good projects. Also, ICO's are in bubble because people are speculating on them - they are not buying tokens because they believe in projects, they buy them to sell a few weeks later after expected pump.

Satoshi didn't want Bitcoin to be strongly influenced by a few persons, even by himself or other developers, and Bitcoin was designed to be based on community consensus. Sure, there will be some panic if Satoshi will get arrested by authorities or will start moving his coins, but there's nothing that can cause a long term damage - there is no master keys or backdoors. As for your scenario, no one will believe any forced "confessions", and Satoshi is not actively influential so again, it won't kill Bitcoin.

Social media polls aren't very representative and can just easily be manipulated. Like, there's a poll on CoinDesk with nearly even results for all 3 options - support, oppose, not decided, but lets not forget that CoinDesk belongs to the same DCG that is behind the fork. Users who frequently engage in Bitcoin discussions usually have pretty strong opinion on the fork - just check /r/Bitcoin or this forum, you'll rarely see anyone undecided. Those who don't have their opinion yet are probably newbies or people who threat Bitcoin very casually, because both don't have enough knowledge to understand what's happening. But they would quickly learn if someone from the forkers would tell them to install btc1 client and import their private keys - because that sounds really suspicious even for unexperienced users.

Governments and banksters can no longer deny that Bitcoin works, so they picked up a new tactic - praising blockchain. But from technical point of view, blockchain was created to solve the problem of double spending in decentralized environment, so when someone tries to use it in their centralized, permissioned environments, blockchain loses a lot of its core features that make it valuable. Essentially, centralized blockchains are just applications of the same cryptography that has been around for years, and they don't fully solve problems of trust. Decentralized blockchain-based services are what's actually going to disrupt the entire economy, but they might still be far away from us.